Video: Follow the Pen

When Shantell Martin, an artist known for her stream-of-consciousness drawings, moved to New York from Tokyo five years ago, she left an established career as a visual jockey, illustrating beats and sounds for Japan’s music élite. Setting foot in Brooklyn for the first time, she questioned her existence. Martin hadn’t yet discovered her signature colorless illustrations, but she blanketed the back of her bedroom door with innumerable “WHO ARE YOU?”s written in bold, black ink. Every morning, she’d rise and stare at it before venturing into the world. “I mean, it’s so difficult to truly be yourself,” she says. “Everyone, and everything, is telling you to be someone else.” Martin soon rephrased the question on her door—“ARE YOU YOU?”—and this new wording lead to a potential answer: you are you! “It’s such a simple, yet profound, response”—a concept few people embrace. She printed all three phrases on stickers, and also created backlit installations of them. A “WHO ARE YOU?” now hangs in her SoHo studio (“It’s such an industry question”), and a “YOU ARE YOU” is in her bedroom. “You know, a reminder,” she says. “We all need to be reminded.”

Martin draws on people, on airplanes, and on clothing; her whimsical white button-downs are not for sale, though. The marker-covered helmets resting on the table in the middle of her studio will take center stage in an upcoming Vespa 946 campaign. The exterior of a Brooklyn restaurant near her home is another recent canvas for her illustrations. A regular at tech and art conferences, Martin is speaking at PopTech today, where she will expand upon the phrase that guides her daily life: follow the pen.

Under the southern portion of the city exists its negative image: a network of more than two hundred miles of galleries, rooms, and chambers.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.